Why didn't he just continue with his speech? It's not like he was injured. Poor baby, his clothes got dirty. How much more adult would he be to just laugh it off and continue? I don't think the pie throwers had a back up plan.

Yeah, I think that if he continued with his speech without breaking stride that'd send the right message: "Sorry, you're gonna have to shoot me." But it's a lot to ask of someone who expected to give a boring speech and collect a check and instead got hit with a couple of lemon meringues.

I'd want to go to the bathroom and wipe the key lime out of my hair before delivering my speech on foreign policy.

Fair enough, and maybe he did. I would be tempted to deliver the speech pastrified, to shame the pie throwers. Real question, would you keep the check if you didn't give the speech, you know, for the effort?

I know everybody hates Friedman and I ought to chip in with a rousing "Take that, [insert blog-meme reference]! Maureen Dowd, you're next, you [insert blog-meme reference]," but I just like seeing famous people get hit by pies. I really wish it happened more often.

Let's tie a whole bunch of threads together, since ogged has an itchy posting finger today: The important question here is whether it'd be worse to hit Eli Lake with a pie than it is to call him ugly. I contend that the former would be more of a net-utility boost than the latter, but unfortunately I'm not an act-utilitarian.

I'm pretty apathetic on the pieing act itself, as Friedman is a bit of a ridiculous character but not very evil.

What really gets me about the video, and turns me against Friedman, is that he just walks off the stage after a long period of slack-jawed inaction.

After getting the cloth to clean the pie off one's hand and neck, any person worth their salt would simply continue with the speech as if nothing had happened. And would only attempt a wisecrack if one is exceptionally witty. It's not like he needed immediate drycleaning for the black turtleneck, I think he'd be able to find another affordable one.

In empire, there can be no greater obligation than the obligation of the empire's subjects to work toward dismantling and recreating their own lives, and to become, in mind, body, and work, threats to the very nature of imperialism. I am suggesting that we dedicate ourselves to becoming national security threats, whether that means growing tomatoes or smashing our televisions or calling our congressmen every day or standing in the streets of our towns and the streets of the capital, climbing out of our comfort zones of action, being imaginative, having the courage to bear witness and tell stories and bring solidarity and humor and energy and truth to every moment of our days.

After getting the cloth to clean the pie off one's hand and neck, any person worth their salt would simply continue with the speech as if nothing had happened.

He was actually about to do that, but a bunch of people in the audience encouraged him to go clean himself off before continuing (which you can hear in the video).

Also, not to defend Friedman or anything, but the pie throwers sound kinda insufferable:

The pamphlets thrown by the male accomplice identified the pair as the "Greenwash Guerillas," who wrote that they were acting "on behalf of the earth (sic) and all true environmentalists."

One side of the pamphlet contains an excerpt from a September 2006 review of Friedman's book, "The World is Flat," written by Raymond Lotta for the journal "Revolution," which styles itself as the "Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA." The review is highly critical of Friedman, who the review claims cannot see his own errors while "seated in the business class of his analytical jetliner."

The point of pieing the mighty is to make them look foolish, partly by covering them with pie-filling and partly by putting them in situations that they don't expect and can't control. It's also a demonstration of the excessiveness of the security state and its commitment to protecting the powerful from even the smallest inconvenience, since the pie-ers are almost always charged with something really punitive and ridiculous like terrorism rather than the much, much smaller charges they'd face if they simply pied an ordinary citizen.

It's funny--pies are nearly always a tactic of the left, not the right. Clowning generally is--like those kids who dressed up as clowns and mocked the KKK rally, or like how we drove off those touring minutemen types here in Minneapolis by standing on the steps of the capitol and making fun of them.

I think it can be more difficult than you would think to recover one's wits after a sudden shock.

I am, reminded of this joke (I was originally going to quote the punchline and just refer to the joke, but it seems worth quoting in full)

"Tell me," asked an American of three Frenchmen, "what is sang froid? I know it means cold blood literally, but what are its connotations?"

"That," said Andre, "is best answered with an example. Imagine, my friend, that you are away on a business trip, but have come back unexpectedly soon, and find your wife in bed with your best friend. You do not wish to get emotional, to heat your blood. Instead you stay cool. If, like a true Parisian, you can smile, wave chearily, and say, 'Pardon the intrusion,' you, my friend have sang froid."

"Nonesense," scoffed Jacques, "that is merely tact. To explain sang froid let us imagine the same situation. If, on finding your wife in bed with your best friend you say, 'Pardon the intrusion; please continue,' then, my friend, you have sang froid."

"Bah," sneered Pierre, "that is ordinary politeness. Let me explain ang froid. Let us return to the same situation. If, after you have said, 'Pardon the intrusion; please continue,' the gentleman in bed can indeed continue, than he has sang froid."

Also, not to defend Friedman or anything, but the pie throwers sound kinda insufferable

Sounding insufferable doesn't mean they're not right. Friedman has made a living off shamelessly hawking global capitalism, to the point where anyone who reads his books or his columns has to wonder whether or not he's getting paid for product placement ("I used my Verizon Wireless phone to call up Google Maps and locate the nearest MacDonalds in Punjab. Enjoy Pepsi!"), and after years of acting as a spokesman for the forces that are flushing the ecosystem down the toilet he's decided that environmentalism is chic, so he's trying to peddle a comfy, corporate-friendly response to global warming. Fuck Thomas Friedman.

26: Links? "Right-wing pie-throwing" doesn't seem to yield much. What's depressing is that since the US is already skewed so far to the right, the right wing could probably make a lot of headway with a pie-ing campaign.

There were fundies with abortion pictures on the campus lawn these past two days. How I hate them, and how I hope they never figure out that mockery works better than sincerity. How I wish that someone had pied them, too.

I was thinking of clowning and mockery in general, not pie throwing specifically (I should have quoted the next sentence of your comment). I was really thinking of the idea from the 60's that mockery was inherently a weapon of the anti-establishment, and that the establishment had to be committed to taking itself seriously, which seems like it has proven to be false.

32: These ones had a big set of signs that read "genocide pictures ahead", and had fenced off their huge, highly visible display so that the easily disturbed could only see it from six or eight feet away and not up close.

They also weren't students--I admit that my previous experience of front groups on college campuses has more to do with communists than christians, but I can't say I like it either way.

These ones had a big set of signs that read "genocide pictures ahead", and had fenced off their huge, highly visible display so that the easily disturbed could only see it from six or eight feet away and not up close.

39: There, I'd probably like to go over and draw little Dali-like mustaches and beards on each of the fetus pictures. If confronted explain "No, no, you see this way they look older, more adult, they're more sympathetic that way!".

42: Next time, I pie. I was delighted to see them all horribly drenched and cold in the unexpected downpour this morning, though. It probably made them feel like they were suffering for their special, important beliefs, but I was still happy to see it.

...after years of acting as a spokesman for the forces that are flushing the ecosystem down the toilet he's decided that environmentalism is chic, so he's trying to peddle a comfy, corporate-friendly response to global warming.

I would think that the accrual of careerist, self-promoting barnacles like Friedman is a desirable (for reasons of mass, momentum and something else that I can't think of right now but is metaphorically appropriate) and an inevitable aspect of the ascension of ecological concerns from the basement panic attacks of hippies to the common atmosphere.

I once bought my sister-in-law a Manowar album for Christmas, because she loves modern over-the-top metal and I thought she might appreciate the old stuff. Immediately prior to opening presents that night, we were having a conversation about metal, and she and my brother spent ten minutes trashing Manowar. Least succesful gift I've ever given.

These ones had a big set of signs that read "genocide pictures ahead", and had fenced off their huge, highly visible display

I recently watched Unborn in America which was not as good as I hoped, but does give a very good picture of those groups.

Watching that documentary was frustrating because, looking at the various pro-life demonstration tactics it was obvious exactly what elements of human psychology they were playing off of and why it would be effective.

Someone says, about the fetus pictures, something like, "even the people who hate us, and that we're going this, still won't forget the pictures."

I would think that the accrual of careerist, self-promoting barnacles like Friedman is a desirable (for reasons of mass, momentum and something else that I can't think of right now but is metaphorically appropriate) and an inevitable aspect of the ascension of ecological concerns from the basement panic attacks of hippies to the common atmosphere.

But accrual to what?

I can definitely see Friedman going around the world saying "Throw everything away and buy more eco-conscious versions! And then throw those away as soon as you can afford even more eco-conscious things! Eco-consciousness is a capitalist bonanza!"

46: Well, yes and no. That leeches like Friedman have decided that environmentalism is savvy is probably a good sign; that they've decided to try to steer environmental policy in a direction towards some super-corporatist fantasy where we save the planet by buying GE products is bad. If along with the rising tide of recognition for the environmental movement we had greater prominence for the voices of the environmental left, I'd feel better, but instead we had the same old group of corrupt idiots trying to co-opt the most important long-term area of public policy out there.

See, I am in full support of be-pieing as political speech. I leave it to the young, adventurous and fast on their feet but I am fond of the idea that the originators of and mouthpieces for bald-faced propaganda, warmongers, etc., cannot plot and plan and rely on everyone else simply being too nice to point out what complete dickwads they are. They can crack fag jokes or try to look dignified in their black turtlenecks all they want but that moment in which their entire carefully arranged Tinker Toy facade of public persona is abolished is something I find utterly delightful. I also suspect it bothers them a lot, deep down, because these people's entire dog and pony show relies on being taken seriously and to be taken as complete jokes for even a moment must sear them to the core.

Also, I hate pro-life protesters so I think you should probably throw rocks instead of pies but that's just me.

OT: This is why it's important to read the good libertarians. It's not just that they're right on a lot of things, it's that they're more right than the average liberal on a lot of things. Logan is actually going very gently on Yglesias here - the point, which Logan is softpedaling, is that Yglesias's ideal foreign policy would still have produced Iraq, which to my mind drives a truck through the premise of Yglesias's book. I wish Yglesias had invited some people to his left to this Book Club; as it is, it looks like I only have the libertarian.

59: Stras, can you push that a little further? I didn't read Logan as saying that any set of policies that permitted GWI would also permit GWII--a pretty damning hypothesis--just that GWI was not the universally acclaimed production that it's been rehabilitated as.

You're right that MY should have an interlocutor to his left, though. The whole foreign policy discourse is so far to his right that 90% of the time he's exactly right; the trouble is, he likes that position, and aside from the occasional throwaway line about how he likes free trade agreements, he rarely acknowledges that there is any left critique because it's so much softer than anything he's responding to.

FWIW Sadaam had a case against the Kuwaitis. He certainly overplayed his hand, however. And there was considerable opposition to GWI, "no blood for oil", "battle hardened Iraqi army" "10,000 body bags" etc. from many of the same people who opposed GWII. In fact the lost credibility of those protesters of GWI led to people ignoring the same warnings against GWII. Crying wolf and all that. Sometimes, there is a wolf.

That is why the people who had credibility with the media, and had supported GWI, but thought GWII was a bad idea, should not have gone on the media and claimed that GWII was a good idea just because they were afraid of becoming unpopular with Karl Rove!

65:Bukharin's work on Imperialism was recommended to Matt on a earlier thread. Matt admitted he hasn't read many socialist works. I presume MY has read little in anarchism. I wonder if MY has read Chomsky or Chalmers Johnson.

People like MY should provide a database or listing of books read;wouldn't be hard just to type in the title. I wouldn't then hold him responsible for knowing a book he might have skimmed or didn't finish;but others might.

65: The problem with Gulf War I is that there's no seamless division between it and the current Iraq War. (Jim Henley points this out quite often.) The war in Kuwait lead directly to a regime of sanctions, inspections, and no-fly zones - policed by regular bombing - that ran from the end of the Bush I administration throughout the Clinton administration, and dramatically escalated tensions between America and Iraq, to the point where it became quite common on the center-left of the late nineties to speculate about how we might "take Saddam out." All of this flowed from an increasing military entanglement with Iraq that began with Desert Storm. And by the time you get to the point where Clinton has pulled the inspectors out and is raining cruise missiles down on Baghdad, there was a growing consensus in the foreign policy establishment that America's military involvement with Iraq would only end with regime change.

All of which is to say that the Gulf War - a war that Yglesias, like many other Democrats and liberals, views as a paradigmatic example of justified multilateral intervention - lead inevitably to the war that Yglesias, like most other liberals, considers a catastrophe of historic proportions. And this should be worrying for a couple reasons: first, if a war that is now considered to be "multilateral" and "just" can have repercussions as vast and damaging as the Gulf War's, then America needs to dramatically raise the bar when it comes to its standard for foreign intervention - and in doing so, dramatically scale back its presence overseas. And second: if the consensus on the center-left right now is that Gulf War I was kosher, then liberalism really hasn't learned anything at all from Iraq, and is doomed to keep creating more and more Iraqs and Vietnams.

Bukharin's work on Imperialism was recommended to Matt on a earlier thread. Matt admitted he hasn't read many socialist works. I presume MY has read little in anarchism. I wonder if MY has read Chomsky or Chalmers Johnson.

I often get the impression Yglesias kind of pretends that nobody to his left actually exists. The closest he's going to come is reading The Nation from time to time, which hardly counts at this point; he's way too conscious of his status in the Beltway/punditry pecking order to spend any time reading Chomsky or Johnson. I remember him once kind of half-dismissively referring to Glen Greenwald as a bit too far to the left for him, and I thought to myself, "Greenwald? You've got to be kidding me."

74: Which part, the part about him being obsessively self-aware about his status in the Beltway pecking order or the part about him not reading Chomsky and Johnson? Because I think the former is fairly well-documented, and that Yglesias himself would admit to it, albeit in an overly-ironic, kidding-on-the-square manner.

The war in Kuwait lead directly to a regime of sanctions, inspections, and no-fly zones

Directly in the sense of "chronologically," but not in any sense of "causally" or "ineluctably." If GHWB doesn't invite the Kurds and Marsh Arabs to revolt, then we have no need to institute no-fly zones. If we're less Chicken Little about Hussein's WMD, then we have no need for sanctions (or at least the kind of intensive sanctions that are so problematic). The former is far more avoidable than the latter, but, really, it shouldn't be hard to look at Saddam Hussein and his army in March, 1991, and say, "He's contained for the foreseeable future. Our work here is done."

IOW, the problem with GWI is all contained in the part that you claim is "seamless" with the part that was, all in all, a fairly good thing (the Kuwaiti gov't is bad, and Iraq troops never emptied an incubator, but really, what is the supposed good that comes from letting every big country annex its neighbors at will?). I see seams. So does MY, and I'd imagine a lot of others.

I'm actually kind of ambivalent about GWI, but not because I think the very fact of it made GWII inevitable. There's a pretty good argument that the overall political culture in 1991 made the bad follow-ons to GWI all too likely, but that means that you need to critique that culture, not that GWI was inherently evil*. As near as I can tell, MY is, in fact, critiquing that culture - the culture that makes every enemy into Hitler, and every temporary ally the spiritual descendants of Washington at Valley Forge.

The trouble with the radical anti-imperial critique, as I read it, is that it very quickly boils down to "patrol your own borders, and pray that the guy next door doesn't get greedy."

* If you want to make the inherently-evil argument, it needs to begin with the invasion of Kuwait and end with its liberation; the follow-on stuff was all avoidable, had Washington wanted to avoid it

76: He's responding to a column of Chomsky's in the Guardian. Has he ever read a book by Chomsky, though? And not one of those recent collections of interviews, either, but something like Deterring Democracy or Manufacturing Consent?

And the larger point stands - Yglesias doesn't engage with people to his left, but always engages with writers to his right, whether they're social conservatives (Douthat), economic conservatives (McArdle) or libertarians. Of course, he's not unique in this - Ezra Klein does this, too, and it's understandable from a professional standpoint: acceptable discourse in DC runs from Bill Kristol on the right to Ezra Klein on the left.

I thought that Marc Ambinder guy was pretty liberal when he first started, but soon afterwards it became clear that he is a creature who cares only for the horse race, so whether he is liberal is irrelevant.

Directly in the sense of "chronologically," but not in any sense of "causally" or "ineluctably."

This would only be the case if the military, political, and foreign policy establishments of the United States during the 1990s were completely different from the actually-existing military, political, and foreign policy establishments of the United States. Given that the American foreign policy establishment didn't see ending the sanctions regime and withdrawing flights from Iraq as an option, and given that there was increasing pressure both domestically and internationally on the United States based on the plight of Iraqis under sanctions, the "solution" that think-tankers and politicians were going to increasingly be talking about was regime change. And, in fact, they did. That's why we got the Iraq Liberation Act; that's why we got people like Josh Marshall praising Gore during the debates as the one who'd be able to take Saddam out; that's why there's was clamoring for an invasion of Iraq not just from AEI and PNAC but from people like Ken Pollack Ann-Marie Slaughter. Remember that the "humanitarian" case for war wasn't just that Saddam Was A Very Bad Man, but that sanctions had killed untold thousands of Iraqis, and that America had a moral responsibility to repair the damage.

As the most liberal Atlantic blogger, he can hardly engage with his cob-loggers without engaging in writers to his right.

Yglesias was regularly engaging with Ross Douthat long before either of them had a spot at the Atlantic. Same goes for Yglesias's various libertarian and economic conservative friends. And there's nothing wrong with that per se, but I'd like to see a broadening of the discourse to include, for example, those who find the postwar consensus on foreign policy incredibly destructive, who talk about the structural and systemic factors that shape US foreign policy, who don't think America should be running the world.

I thought that Marc Ambinder guy was pretty liberal when he first started

I thought Ambinder had previously tipped to being a centrist Republican. That might well be wrong; I was wrong about Fallows.

And the larger point stands - Yglesias doesn't engage with people to his left,

Well, he's not that lefty. Then, there aren't that many people that far to his left in his social circle. And, also, like it or not, what he's doing now is a job and part of a career. Which means that it's not simply him consciously choosing what arguments are respectable arguments.

His response to Chomsky does point out a weakness with a lot of the Nation-and-points-left discourse: rote Manicheanism. Once you've been schooled in the consistent strain of imperial-capitalistic purpose in U.S. foreign policy, regardless of ideological cover (Walter LaFeber's Inevitable Revolutions is the go-to for this on Latin America, if anyone needs some sponsorship-of-brutality beach reading), every conflict looks like a nail.

"Nuance", not to mention approval, comes from engaging in the penny-ante ground level specifics, and MY is great at taking apart the political back-and-forth of the last seven years in ways that make sense. I really liked Heads In The Sand for that reason, and I think his prescriptions are valuable -- if you're willing to overlook the degree to which multilateral institutions are used to consolidate empire and corporate power, which I wasn't in the nineties and won't be next year. (Granted, he's not writing about the IMF and World Bank, but it seems that kind of "peacetime multilateralism" is the kind of international state-of-play that he approves of, with the U.S. playing nice but acting as unquestioned agenda-setter.)

I would love to read a writer who was as engaged with politics as practiced as MY but who had a somewhat more substantial critique of politics as empire.

stras you started off, in 59, saying that liberal internationalism was flawed because it approved of Gulf War I, which inevitably led to Gulf War II. But your explanation for why it led to Gulf War II in 86 is that people in Washington aren't constrained by liberal internationalism. I'm not sure that can be a flaw in liberal internationalism.

Well, he's not that lefty. Then, there aren't that many people that far to his left in his social circle. And, also, like it or not, what he's doing now is a job and part of a career. Which means that it's not simply him consciously choosing what arguments are respectable arguments.

Of course, as I alluded to earlier in 73. Like Ezra Klein and the rest of the TAP people, he's a moderate in a circle of moderates, and he's savvy enough to recognize the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. Which is why I'd be surprised if he'd even bother seriously reading lefty critiques of American foreign policy, much less full-blown socialism. The Post and the Times aren't going to publish Chalmers Johnson.

The political blogosphere is going to get pretty interesting under a Dem president (ojalla que sea). It will be interesting to see who resists the temptation to simply close ranks behind the Well-Meaning Leader to resist the onslaught from the newly energized soi-disant underdog winger brigade, and who continues to push from the left.

I can't figure out what Mr. Yglesias is trying to argue here by discounting -- or trying to discount -- the obvious and long-stated geopolitical strategies of numerous administrations, the end product of which was finally manifest in the wholly illegal invasion of Iraq. To believe that just because the Bush administration comprises a heady mix of lunatics and bunglers who "don't understand the Middle East", it must follow that they cannot have long term strategic plans. This is nonsense. Many of the incompetent neocon hacks in the White House had and continue to have very grand plans, indeed, despite what Mr. Yglesias might wish to believe, which seems to be an unwholesome call to "move along, folks, just a bunch of incompetent jerks here; no big plans or anything."

96: That's not his criticism. His criticism, and mine, is that MY is a centrist writer who is perceived as lefter than he is. It's fine to anthropologize that out to his social circle and his economic interests, but it's hardly utopian to wish for leftier writers on the left.

MY is a good writer. He's created a space for a thoughtful, liberal critique of a foreign policy in a political discourse that wasn't having any of it. He's changed his mind. He's clearly capable of moving his position, and not completely bound by the narrowest rules of the game. It's not utopian to hope that he learns more about history and theory and moves further left, and he's a persuasive-enough writer that I at least think that's worth wishing for.

The left complains that there are no real leftists in the media, but where are the conservatives? I can't think of any MSM conservatives outside of Pat Buchanan who criticized the war from the right. Same on immigration.

Yeah ! And where are all of the conservative environmentalists and conservative civil libertarians in the media ! Don't try to tell me they don't exist !

bjk, dig this: It is not "liberals" that are kept out of the media. It is political positions identified with liberalism. As it happens, most of the people who hold political positions identified with liberalism happen to be liberals.

Immigration is a real problem for the media though, because while the media is comfortable with thinly disguised racism, a lot of the immigration wingers don't take the trouble to adopt a disguise.

I'm glad you agree, 102. I like your enthusiasm. Pro-war conservatism is a relatively recent conservative heresy. When Bob Dole was running for VP he still referred to the "Democrat wars", meaning the WWs, Korea, Vietnam. Republicans opposed Kosovo. Even Bush ran as an old-fashioned realist, non-interventionist conservative in 2000.

Yes, if you ignore the 40's, 50's and 60's. Dole was speaking a year after the Vietnam War, in pretty much the only time since WWII that conservatives haven't tended towards hawkishness. And that didn't last long at all, and was utterly forgotten by 1980.

Some of the isolationist convervatives' comments about FDR's pre-Pearl Harbor Atlantic policies can be shocking by today's standards. I think it was a Senator from Montana - Burton Wheeler? - who compared lend-lease to the Agricultural Adjustment Act: it would end up plowing under every fourth American boy.

If MY doesn't think people like Chomsky or Johnson have a popular following or anything interesting to say why should he waste time engaging with them?

We're talking about a writer who spends much of his time engaging with libertarians. What percentage of the population do they make up, exactly? Certainly no more than socialists in the US. And outside the US, socialism is positively mainstream, whereas libertarians are isolated freaks. As for whether or not Yglesias thinks Chomsky et al have anything "interesting to say," I couldn't say; he appears, however, to have spent far more time considering the intellectual excretions of Jonah Goldberg and Kathryn Jean Lopez, so I doubt very much that "interesting" has much of anything to do with it.

i watched the video and feel sorry for the man, don't know what he did to draw such a hostility, but the pie throwers should be ashamed, people are so cruel, they are not that different from him too, if they wanted to reprimand him for something
i suppose for the war support
the same feeling when i read about how Iranian President was giving speech at the Columbia University and got pretty harsh treatment

Do you know what "or" means? Presumedly Yglesias engages with libertarians because he finds them interesting and the likes of Goldberg and Lopez because they have a popular following that it is important to oppose lest it grow.

bjk, your idea that the opposition to Vietnam was primarily Republican - or more than incidentally Republican - is ludicrous.

Bob Dole was a prominent Republican in a more innocent time. When Dole was at his political peak, people who told ludicrous lies - as Dole did with his suggestion that Republicans were mostly against the wars of the 20th century - would be mocked for it, just as Dole was.

In our debased age, you think you can get away with this kind of horseshit because, well, you can in most venues. But come on, it's still horseshit and you can't expect to be taken seriously among people who are paying any kind of attention at all.

i watched the video and feel sorry for the man, don't know what he did to draw such a hostility, but the pie throwers should be ashamed, people are so cruel, they are not that different from him too, if they wanted to reprimand him for somethingi suppose for the war support

More for his love of globalized capitalism and inability to understand that the people who are made rich by it are not representative of people in general.

121. Nearly but not quite. Tojo got you in WWII, and contrary to what seems to be widespread belief in America, Hitler then declared war on the USA, in support of his ally. Eisenhower (R) got you into Vietnam, though admittedly Kennedy got in deeper and Johnson deeper still.

Presumedly Yglesias engages with libertarians because he finds them interesting

Or because (1) he's personally friendly with several libertarians, but not personally friendly with any leftists; and (2) libertarian ideology is taken to be acceptable in professional Washington discourse in a way that socialist and anarchist ideology is not.

123: There's an element of truth that libertarian ideas are interesting to engage with - they're so stripped-down as to be challenging to the liberal conception of gov't - but I think that stras has the stronger argument here. While I believe that MY's family has a pretty leftist past, I don't think that he himself was anything like a red diaper baby, and my impression from years of reading him is that he views leftist positions as outdated and/or irrelevant (he might not put it that strongly, but the proof is in the pudding). Certainly nothing in his personal path would force him to deal much with leftist positions (he was openly dismissive of them as a collegian, and clearly wouldn't be confronted with it in DC).

This would only be the case if the military, political, and foreign policy establishments of the United States during the 1990s were completely different from the actually-existing military, political, and foreign policy establishments of the United States. Given that the American foreign policy establishment didn't see ending the sanctions regime and withdrawing flights from Iraq as an option

Well, for the first part, I think that MY is explicitly arguing for a different (perhaps not completely) m, p, and fp establishment from the actually-existing one. His point is that the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait was, in and of itself, a positive thing, one in keeping with his vision for IR and the US role in it. I haven't read HITS, but my reading of MY and references to the book indicates, to me, that he is trying to lay out an approach that hasn't been tried before, and arguing that it's practical and realistic. To do so, he must necessarily engage with actually-occurring history, which will only occasionally offer examples that match some, much less all, of his prescriptions.

As for the second part, I agree that once we have intensive sanctions and no-fly zones, it was going to be hard to get out short of regime change (although I would note that, had Hussein actually chosen to comply with the original weapons inspectors*, the sanctions, if not the no-fly, would likely have been lifted, and Dems wouldn't have been nearly as inclined towards supporting regime change). But, as I said in 80, I don't think that the no-fly was inevitable, even given our actually-existing m, p, and fp establishment, and I don't think that punitive sanctions were, either.

Let me put it this way: if GHWB had gone into Baghdad in 1991, everyone would now be saying that it was the inevitable follow-on to kicking Iraq out of Kuwait, and that it's naive/dishonest to claim that the US would ever have driven Iraq out of Kuwait and then stopped. Everyone. And they'd be wrong.

* I'm familiar with the run-up to Desert Fox; I know that he wasn't the one who kicked the inspectors out. But he was not complying, either; he was gaming the system, hoping to convince his neighbors he still had WMD without bringing down the wrath of the US. He gambled and lost, just as he did in Kuwait

125As for the second part, I agree that once we have intensive sanctions and no-fly zones, it was going to be hard to get out short of regime change (although I would note that, had Hussein actually chosen to comply with the original weapons inspectors*, the sanctions, if not the no-fly, would likely have been lifted, and Dems wouldn't have been nearly as inclined towards supporting regime change).

It looks to me like you're saying that GWII could have been avoided even after we had sanctions and no-fly zones, but avoiding it would have required not just different policy in America, but also different choices by Saddam as well.

Well, for the first part, I think that MY is explicitly arguing for a different (perhaps not completely) m, p, and fp establishment from the actually-existing one.

I'm pretty sure Yglesias is quite explicitly not saying this. He's arguing, very explicitly, for a return to pre-Bush II liberal interventionism, and has been quite consistent in saying that various reconceptions of American foreign policy are unnecessary, because all we have to do is return to the postwar consensus that was working out so well. I find this to reveal an incredibly narrow and misguided critique of the Bush years, as narrow and misguided in its own way as the incompetence dodge. Bush II's policies didn't come out of nowhere; he wasn't some sudden aberration. He represents, I'd argue, the logical extension of policies America has been pursuing for decades.

On Iraq and the no-fly zones: how else would the actually-existing political class of the US choose to contain Saddam Hussein? Once the decision was made that Saddam had to be "dealt with," and once it was determined that the US wasn't going into Baghdad to forcibly remove him, the only other option acceptable to the American foreign policy establishment was containment - and to them, "containment" was going to involve some kind of sanctions regime. Yes, there was another option altogether, one which eschewed either regime change or containment: the US could've just picked up its stuff and gone home. But tellingly, no one at the time was even discussing this as a possibility. Then, as now, there was a presumption on the part of America's political elite that the United States had a responsibility to respond to anything that happens anywhere in the world, regardless of our knowledge of the situation or the consequences of our actions, and so we left troops in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia for a decade while we bombed and starved Iraq, because even the potential for another "incident" justified a massive and prolonged military intervention in an area of the world we didn't understand.

This assumption is still present in Yglesias's thinking, and more worryingly, it's still present in most professional liberals, who don't seem to see the Gulf War and its aftermath as particularly troubling.

69, 93: Amusingly enough, just this week Yglesias posted something about Bukharin (whom I haven't read, so I can't speak to how cogent it is; it certainly looks like he's familiar with Bukharin).

I'm with stras in 123 -- the bounds of acceptable mainstream Washington discourse run from the center-left to the batshit right, with libertarians serving as the go-to people when you want to throw in something that doesn't fit neatly on the center-left-to-batshit-right spectrum. (I'll hold off from saying anything about certain non-Yglesias Atlantic bloggers, but people seem to have pretty well figured this out as technique for career development.) And that's an improvement from 2004, when the spectrum ran from center-right to batshit-right. I'm personally pretty in sync with an Yglesias-ish foreign policy, but it's absurd that the last 7 years of abject failure haven't opened up any space for a non-interventioniist and non-exceptionalist foreign policy to become something worth talking about, particularly because non-interventionalist is something that I suspect is vastly more popular among Americans at large (if grodier and more right-leaning than I'd like) than among the policy apparatus and commentariat.

Of course, we live in a world where Charlie Gibsoni>in his position as a neutral arbiter gets to say that $200,000/year is a middle-class household income and raising the capital gains tax lowers receipts, so I'm not sure foreign policy is special in that regard; part of Yglesias's point seems to be that Democrats aren't comfortable making arguments against the rightward tilt of the foreign policy commentariat the way they would be with responding to Gibson's Laffer-Lite bullshit. (Not that Clinton and Obama covered themselves in glory there.)

We're talking about a writer who spends much of his time engaging with libertarians. What percentage of the population do they make up, exactly? Certainly no more than socialists in the US.

Maybe, but there are many more libertarians in the soft institutional structures of DC, and that's what matters. Someone recently made that point (or I recently read) as regards neocons: there aren't that many of them (how big can the combined readership of Commentary and the Weekly Standard really be?), but they're really, really well situated, so they end up (a) getting engaged as the describers of a major strand of American thought, and (b) with plum positions at places like the NYT and WaPo.

The socialists need to develop a serious funding source, but that doesn't seem like it would be their area of expertise.

The second paragraph of 127 is 100% correct. We have, for all intents and purposes, been at war with Iraq for 18 years now, and have accomplished *absolutely nothing* of value. Unless there's some inherent value to making life immeasurably worse for the people of that country and spending god only knows how many trillions of dollars to accomplish it.

It looks to me like you're saying that GWII could have been avoided even after we had sanctions and no-fly zones, but avoiding it would have required not just different policy in America, but also different choices by Saddam as well.

Well, not under Bush, it couldn't have. Under President Gore (to a lesser extent Clinton, but I'm not sure the timeline really works), it's entirely conceivable that a SH who didn't obstruct/obfuscate to inspectors could have not only stayed in power, but even had sanctions significantly reduced. But Bush obviously had a hard-on for SH, and would have invaded even if SH had taken the entire UN Assembly on a guided tour of every alleged WMD site.

Anyway, that wasn't my point - my point was that SH had some culpability in how things progressed, because, in his efforts to maintain his power, he made decisions that made GWII more likely and achievable. People, including strongmen, make misjudgments about stuff all the time - Arafat thought he could do better than Camp David 2000, or at least that he could come back and get the same deal later. He wasn't being evil, just misgauging the situation.

130Unless there's some inherent value to making life immeasurably worse for the people of that country and spending god only knows how many trillions of dollars to accomplish it.

We have kept the oil flowing on favorable terms to us, and since GWII, it has flowed through a state of chaos and uncertainty, thus driving the price up without greatly impeding the supply. Reliable cheap oil: good for the American lifestyle, at least in the short term. Reliable expensive oil: fucking outstanding for oil company executives, managers, shareholders, and the campaigns they contribute to.

[Yglesias] has been quite consistent in saying that various reconceptions of American foreign policy are unnecessary, because all we have to do is return to the postwar consensus that was working out so well.

He's also been saying that even his cautious opinion is a rare one. All my sources say that elite opinion takes hawkishness for granted, to the extent that Yglesias counts as a dove. And by now most of them in both parties have Cheney's "So what?" attitude toward public opinion. Basically voters vote for a President every four years, and except for that their opinion should be completely ignored.

My present theory is that Leo Strauss was just a front, and Carl Schmitt is the real neocon philosopher.

127: Maybe I've misread MY; I thought that he had a critique of liberal interventionism-as-it-was. I certainly think that it was problematic, if only because it didn't draw bright enough a line between its goals and empire's. I suspect that the rejoinder is that there is no

134: I'm not tying "culpable" to "immoral." Innocent people can be to blame for things going poorly. SH played a game and lost. If he'd played differently - if he'd gauged just how much the Rs wanted to get him, and how pusillanimous the Ds would be about ratcheting down the situation - then I can easily see how the US never invades Iraq in 2003.

To be clear, I can much more easily see how Clinton could have spent the 90s winding things down in Iraq such that SH wasn't viewed as a credible threat in the 00s. Obviously, Bush has primary culpability. Fuck, Sandra Day O'Connor has some culpability. But SH's song-and-dance with inspectors kept him in the danger zone, and I don't think it had to.

132, 143: JRoth, complaining about various things Saddam did and didn't do is beside the point. That Saddam refused to play along with America's dictates was predictable, which is why there was pressure from America's (universally imperial-minded) foreign policy establishment for a sanctions-and-bombing regime in the first place. The Gulf War set both countries on a collision course, where the United States would insist on stricter and stricter methods to "contain" Iraq, and Iraq would resist its containment in any way it could. The problem for liberal internationalists is that all of this took place within an internationalist framework, from the initial war itself through sanctions and inspections through the no-fly zones, up until the point where war was more or less inevitable, and America's foreign policy establishment was just looking for the right political opportunity to make the pitch.

The problem for liberal internationalists is that all of this took place within an internationalist framework, from the initial war itself through sanctions and inspections through the no-fly zones...

Wasn't there strong support from Russia and France -- not that either one is some sort of kumbaya state, and both are playing oil politics every bit as well as the U.S. if not better -- for ending the sanctions? Not that this invalidates your point.

150: True, there was, which became one of the reasons liberal hawks used as a "humanitarian" reason for the invasion. Sanctions couldn't continue, see, and we couldn't just end them with Saddam still in power, so we had to take him out for the good of the people of Iraq.

The invasion itself certainly represented a break from traditional internationalism, but not that much more than Kosovo was - and up until the invasion everything that happened was apparently kosher by internationalist standards. This is why I suggest we need different, stronger standards: the old ones got us where we are today.